Stellar SMART

Monitor Hard Drive Performance

Stellar Smart is a utility that acts as an "early warning system" for pending hard disk problems. The system is based on Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T). The hard disk's integrated controller works with various sensors to monitor various aspects of the drive's / disk's performance and determines from this information if the disk is behaving normally or not. File system data structures of a drive have suffered serious corruption or overwriting and data recovery software cannot scan such drives.

This drive monitoring software gives the current values of various hard disk parameters such as Temperature, Head Flying Height, Spin-Up Time etc and compares these values to a Threshold value below / above which the hard disk is likely to fail. The moment any one of the current values equals or exceeds the threshold value, the utility displays a warning of impending problems.

The fundamental principle behind S.M.A.R.T is that many problems with hard disks don't occur suddenly. They result from a slow degradation of various mechanical or electronic components. The hard disks parameters usually exhibit a gradual, detectable decline in performance and it is when a parameter value approaches its safety limit that the Stellar Smart issues a warning.